Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (22 page)

“At least,” said someone else, “you’ve done a nice job with the paint color in the living room.”

In home ownership there are two realms: the visible and the invisible, the fun and the unfun, the parts for which there are paint chips and plant nurseries and catalogs filled with doorknobs and drawer pulls and reproductions of Art Deco light fixtures and the parts for which the only gratification is that
your water is running and your lights are on. The visible realm is about choices; the invisible realm is about having no choice. The visible realm is about style; the invisible realm is about substance, though it’s also about having strange men in your house for long periods of time, after which they will charge you a lot of money for only half solving the problem. During the first year in the house, the visible and the invisible competed with each other like siblings who have nothing in common but their parents. There was no doubt, however, about which one I favored. Though I hired an electrician to install a new circuit panel and wrote endless checks to a plumber who replaced many feet of corroded piping beneath the house, my heart belonged to decorating.

And thus also to
Dwell
. And
House Beautiful
and
Architectural Digest
and
Elle Decor
and
Veranda
. Though more nourishing than the HGTV shows—the pages often emphasized how expensive it can be to do things well rather than how cheap it is to do them shoddily—I imbibed them by the stack and, as with
Trading Spaces
and its ilk, sometimes felt like throwing up afterward. It wasn’t just the relentlessness of the magazines, the ubiquity of them, their blockish presence in every doctor’s waiting room, every hair salon, every friend’s bathroom, that got me down even as I devoured them. It was, for me, the intolerable ache of unmet desire they elicited. Just as in my twenties, the hopelessness of ever living in a majestic West End Avenue prewar had made me want to crumble to the sidewalk as I walked past them, reading
Architectural Digest
proved too much an exercise in self-pity (followed by the requisite guilt for said pity) to devote excessive amounts of time to. Did I really need to read about how a record producer and his vegan chef wife turned their ordinary backyard into a Zen garden with an Infinity pool? Was I doing my brittle ego any
favors by exposing it to the smug utterances of an artist couple whose post-and-beam contemporary has not only a living room but also a “conversational pit” and whose carriage house doubles as a studio/gallery/meditation space? If HGTV’s genius lay in its ability to entertain viewers while subconsciously making them feel superior to the hapless homeowners on the shows, the perverted success of high-end shelter magazines (like the fashion magazines that spawned them) was that they entertained you while making you hate not only your house but also yourself. And in the words of the inimitable Alison, I could hate myself on my own; I didn’t need to contract out for it.

Because here was the thing about my particular approach to home renovation: there was—and still is—really no way to characterize it other than half-assed. Lacking the money to make significant changes in fully committed, significant ways, most of my improvements were minor, low cost, and often only semi-improving. Whereas a more ambitious (or less broke) person might have taken out the ancient and wobbly windows and installed new ones, airtight and secure, I simply covered them with curtains and pretended not to notice how easily someone could break in. Whereas, by all rights, the wood floors should have been out and out replaced, I allowed them to be sanded down to a millimeter of their life and then placed rugs over the spots where they buckled from water damage. Whereas the looming disaster of the retaining wall in the backyard would have kept a more responsible person up at night, I elected to put it out of my mind, instead soothing myself to sleep with visions of dinner parties with calla lilies arcing, dancerlike, out of slender glass vases and hors d’oeuvres served on ceramic trays engraved with Asian designs.

In other words, despite all my exertion in the name of home
repair, I often wasn’t repairing as much as I was obscuring. And although this made me feel like a fake and a cheater, it also made me feel as if I were doing
something
. And as I quickly learned, part of the denial that’s essential to home ownership is telling yourself that these somethings—even if they’re tiny, even if they amount to nothing more than reorganizing the silverware drawer—are ultimately making your house worth, if not more, at least not less than the mind-numbing amount you’ve paid. If home ownership is little more than a series of denials about how much money you owe to a bank or a mortgage company, such pseudo-improvements are building blocks of these denials. And they make for nice ceramic serving trays, if not necessarily solid windows.

Enlisting any number of chronically tardy, semi- or non-English-speaking painters and floor refinishers and carpenters and handymen, I set about on my various projects. The remainder of the carpet was pulled up and the floor gingerly resanded by a flooring contractor with a finger missing. The living room was painted mint green, the bedroom bright blue, the bathroom butterscotch (I didn’t bother with the window or door trim, the scuffed and chipping white paint of which was reminiscent of an Upper West Side prewar and thus signified acceptability). In the back room, I did as much as I could while staying within the bounds of what I could still describe as “nothing too major.” Sleek, nickel-plated industrial-style ceiling fans replaced the cheap light fixtures, the concrete floor underneath the brown carpet was polished for a shiny, loftlike effect, and white paint covered every inch of the ceiling and walls, including the fake brick behind the woodstove, which looked considerably less fake that way. Sliding doors leading to the patio were replaced with French doors (this was pretty major, a fact I think I subconsciously tried to deny by
buying faux-vintage doorknobs at Anthropologie—yes, the same store whose catalog reminded me of my garage—and ineptly screwing them into the doors in such a way that they did not rotate but merely protruded from either side as if the door had a bone through its nose). Furniture and appliances were bought via Craigslist: a 1930s-era pedestal bathroom sink, four wrought-iron patio chairs, numerous lamps to compensate for my aversion to overhead lights. Other furniture and appliances—the old bathroom sink, the old light fixtures—were sold on Craigslist or deposited by the curb for bulky-item trash collection. After a few months, the mint green living room was repainted terra-cotta, the bright blue bedroom repainted mint green.

The economy and culture of California being what they are, I became an employer not just of intermittent workers but also of regular help. A Mexican gardener named Fernando came every week for $75 a month. A Guatemalan cleaning lady named Marta came twice a month for $80 a pop. Every so often, a nice man (of no discernible ethnic background) from the water softener company came by and replaced the rock salt for a fee of $45. Having decided there was little point in denying my status as a gentrifier, I joined the neighborhood security association, a network of mostly middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners that employed a small stable of private patrol officers to cruise the neighborhood and scare any potential marauders, most of which amounted to kids loitering near the park. For this service I paid $55 a quarter in dues.

In an effort to keep my personal and professional life in concert with the speedy pulse of my home improvement and maintenance efforts, I tried to be social, to be productive, even occasionally to be joyous. I walked Rex in the park and sat on the hill while he nosed around in the grass. I sang Van Morrison
songs while screwing towel hooks into the bathroom walls or assembling shelves in the closet. I entertained friends. Alison came over for Thai takeout; eight or ten friends came for dinner; a crowd of more than seventy-five showed up for an early October housewarming that spilled from the backyard into all rooms of the house and jammed the surrounding streets with cars. I went to the gym, to yoga, to parties, and to occasional (and still entirely pointless) meetings with movie or TV executives. I met friends for dinner or for drinks and, on one occasion, while chatting with the guy on the bar stool next to me, achieved my goal of looking squarely into an attractive stranger’s eyes and saying, “I own a house.” As it happened, so did he. And it contained his wife and children. This didn’t bother me. Dating him was not the point. Dating in general was not the point. Despite a vague recollection that I’d planned to resume dating or at least combing my hair once I held title and deed on a reasonably well-decorated, furnished, plumbed, and wired house, I still found myself mired in my second latency period. The few men who showed interest in me seemed puerile or psychologically unstable or both. My hair was still too short and too orange. I had no interest in rectifying these matters.

Indeed, amid the euphoria of my home-ownership dream realized, a peculiar darkness had set in around me. Though I’d been counting on the house to make me content—not happy, of course, but content—the act of taking ownership had somehow done the opposite. It was as if my mood had been goaded away from situational discontentedness into a dysthymia that seemed now to be heading into full-fledged depression. In some ways, though, the word “depression” seems not right. What I felt, rather, was asleep. At least half-asleep. Somewhere along the line, in between getting references for all
these workmen, calling them, waiting for them to show up, and hearing excuses as to why they didn’t (the grand-prize winner in the excuse category: “I had internal bleeding”), something had happened to my brain that felt not unlike light anesthesia. It wasn’t that I was unhappy or angry or wanting anything to be different. It was more that I was beginning to feel an unsettling torpor lining the contours of my existence, a sense of neutrality that was only exacerbating my neutered physical essence and slowly pushing me toward a state of being in which my favorite activity, aside from monitoring antique light fixture auctions on eBay, was turning in for the night with Rex. Whether or not it was cold, I preferred he sleep not at the foot of the bed but next to me, preferably with his head on a pillow.

Was I working during this time? Yes. Sort of, anyway. I was teaching the aforementioned graduate writing course at an art college about fifty miles north of L.A., a gig that required me to hold forth on subjects such as “narrative arc” for three hours a week, plus read a lot of student work, much of it about sexual fetishes. I also have a magazine clip or two from this period, so it appears that I hadn’t retired. But my output was minimal to say the least. Did I socialize? Again, my memory of this time is abstruse and slightly surreal, the cognitive manifestation of a finger poking through cotton at the top of an aspirin bottle, but I think I did see friends. I’m pretty sure, however, that I did so for the sole purpose of talking about my house. I know I talked about nothing other than the house in one of my meetings with film executives since my agent called afterward and said only, “I hear you changed your mind about the color of the living room.” Needless to say, I didn’t get a development deal or whatever it was I was supposedly in there to get. In fact, it was one of my last “industry meetings.” My
agent—understandably, mercifully—moved on to other clients. I moved on from the cumbersome lie of pretending I was interested in anything other than the acquisition of the perfect set of wall sconces. With friends, I no longer bothered with conversational throat clearing. There was no “How are you? What have you been up to?” Just “What do you know about bathtub caulk?”

“You’re allowed to stay on this topic for six months,” Alison told me (she of the full-service condo with the tiny terrace and the Jacuzzi tub and appliances so new that even a nuclear attack would not interrupt the spin cycle; she who didn’t know what it meant to able to smell your electricity). “You’re beginning to bore people. Maybe you should try going on a date.”

Of course, what I knew but had not yet brought myself to fully articulate was that I was on a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week date with my house and had no room for any other relationship. Three months, four months, six months into my home ownership, and I still had a moratorium on pleasures of the flesh or even the prefatory pleasures of being taken out to dinner. In fact, this moratorium had gradually extended into a moratorium on things I’d once assumed myself incapable of not doing: working, socializing, reading.

But there I was, not doing them. I was not, in fact, doing anything. At night (and, admittedly, for much of the day) I would sit at my desk in the rec-room-turned-loftlike space and stare at the industrial-style ceiling fan above my head until I felt I could almost rise up into it and allow the blades to cut fine slices off the top of my scalp. Other times I would lie in bed for more than an hour in the late afternoon, watching dusk float through the windows and settle into the house like a tranquilizer. Los Angeles has magic-hour lighting that literally has the effect of allowing one to see the world through a rose-tinted
glass, and from my bed this display looked marvelous, even somehow culturally significant. It was as if the house demanded that I be there as a witness to its fleeting moments of beauty. And I, having increasingly nowhere to go and nothing to do, was happy to obey. This was no longer light anesthesia. This was a coma.

If there is anything I pride myself on, it’s dental and mental hygiene. I’ve never had a cavity, nor have I ever found myself unable to cope with most of what comes up in the life of a person of my particular station. By the time I acquired my house, I’d figured out how to earn a living, how to unclog the toilet, when to rotate my car tires, when to take something to the dry cleaner. I had, back at age thirty, realized that loose-fitting tops are best paired with streamlined bottoms and vice versa (at twenty-seven I did not know this). I could cook dinner for friends (nothing haute cuisine, but passable), walk into crowded parties by myself, speak in front of large audiences, and take long international flights without drugging myself or worrying excessively about losing my passport. But the year I became a homeowner, my teeth continued to thrive while something else eroded. My grip on my own humanity was loosening. There is no way to explain it other than I seemed to be allergic to both the outside world and myself. I couldn’t stand being alone in my house and yet could not bear to be around most people. It was as if the pleasure in solitude that had once worked so well in my favor had become a foul-tasting compulsion, the toxic centerpiece of my life.